Jacobin (magazine)

Jacobin
Issue 11/12 (fall 2013)
Publisher Bhaskar Sunkara
Categories Politics, culture
Frequency Quarterly
Circulation 40,000[1]
First issue Winter 2011
Country United States
Based in New York
Language English
Website jacobinmag.com
ISSN 2158-2602

Jacobin is a socialist quarterly magazine based in New York offering socialist and anti-capitalist perspectives on politics, economics and culture from the American left. Articles include pieces on wealth inequality, the power of mass protest, the economic reasons behind Puerto Rico's crisis after Hurricane Maria and (sometimes critical) pieces on unions. Its paid print circulation was 36,000 and its website drew more than a million views a month in 2017.[2] Noam Chomsky has called the magazine "a bright light in dark times".[3]

History and overview

The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010,[4] but it expanded into a print journal later that year.[5] Jacobin has been described by its founder Bhaskar Sunkara as a radical publication, "largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieus like Dissent or New Politics".[6] Sunkara has said that the aim of the magazine was to create a publication which combined resolutely socialist politics with the accessibility of titles such as The Nation and The New Republic.[7] He has also contrasted it to publications associated with small leftist groups, such as the International Socialist Organization's Socialist Worker and International Socialist Review which are oriented towards party members and other revolutionary socialists, seeking a broader audience than those works whilst still anchoring the magazine in a Marxist perspective.[8]

Earlier in 2013, Jacobin Books was announced, a partnership with Verso Books and Random House.[9] A collection of essays by Jacobin contributors was published by Henry Holt and Company in 2016. "Class Action: An Activist Teacher's Handbook", produced in conjunction with the Chicago Teachers Union's CORE Caucus and Jacobin was distributed to trade union activists in the 16 cities in the United States and Canada.[10] Additionally, since the fall of 2014 it has sponsored more than 80 socialist reading groups.[11]

In the spring of 2017, Jacobin editors collaborated with scholars Vivek Chibber and Robert Brenner to release the academic journal Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.[12]

The name of the magazine derives from the book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James in which James ascribes the Black Haitian revolutionists a greater purity in regards to their attachment to the ideals of the French Revolution than the French Jacobins.[8] According to creative director Remeike Forbes, the logo was inspired by a scene in the movie Burn! referring to Nicaraguan national hero José Dolores Estrada,[13] but it represents Toussaint Louverture, the most well known leader of the only successful slave revolt in human history.[14]

The magazine's motto, "Reason in Revolt", is a reference to a line from "The Internationale".

Contributors

Notable Jacobin contributors have included Slavoj Žižek, Bob Herbert, Yanis Varoufakis, Hilary Wainwright, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jeremy Corbyn and Pablo Iglesias Turrión. Sunkara has said he feels that "all of our writers fit within a broad socialist tradition", noting that the magazine does sometimes publish articles by liberals and social democrats, but that such pieces are written from a perspective that is consistent with the magazine's editorial vision, saying that "we might publish a piece by a liberal advocating single-payer healthcare, because they’re calling for the decommodification of a sector; and since we believe in the decommodification of the whole economy, it fits in". In terms of the sociological background of contributors, Sunkara acknowledged that they were mostly under the age of 35 and stated that "there are a lot of grad students, young adjunct professors or tenured professors. We also have quite a few organizers and union researchers involved [...] and people working in NGOs or around housing rights, that kind of thing".[7]

Ideology

It has been variously described as democratic socialist, socialist and Marxist.[15][16] According to an article published by the Nieman Journalism Lab, it is a journal of "democratic socialist thought".[17] Writing in the New Statesman, Max Strasser suggested that the journal claims to "take the mantle of Marxist thought of Ralph Miliband and a similar vein of democratic socialism".[18]

In an interview published in New Left Review, Sunkara named a number of ideological influences on the magazine, including Michael Harrington, who he described as "very underrated as a popularizer of Marxist thought"; Ralph Miliband and others influenced by Trotskyism without fully embracing it, such as Leo Panitch; theorists working in the Eurocommunist tradition; and "Second International radicals" including Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky.[7]

In an article published in the Weekly Worker, Jim Creegan highlighted the association of a number of the magazine's editors and writers with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), describing Jacobin as "the closest thing to a flagship publication of the DSA left" whilst also stressing the political diversity of contributors, incorporating "everyone from social democratic liberals to avowed revolutionaries". He also noted several features of the publication's editorial stance, namely its rejection of anti-communism; its skepicism regarding the possibility of the Democratic Party being transformed into a social-democratic movement through internal pressure, advocating instead the formation of a mass-based independent labor party; criticism of the parties of the Socialist International, which they argue have been responsible for imposing neoliberal austerity policies; and a conviction that the Nordic model of social democracy is ultimately not viable and that the only alternative to capitalism would be for militant labor and socialist movements to struggle to replace capitalism with socialism.[19]

The New York Times ran a profile of Sunkara in January 2013, commenting on the publication's unexpected success and engagement with mainstream liberalism.[20] In a 2013 article for Tablet Magazine, Michelle Goldberg discussed Jacobin as part of a revival of interest in Marxism among young intellectuals.[21] Jake Blumgart, who contributed to the magazine in its early years, stated that it "found an audience by mixing data-driven analysis and Marxist commentary with an irreverent and accessible style".[15]

References

  1. ↑ "Fluctuates a lot — right now our total circulation is 40,000 but only around 30,000 are subscribers, rest newsstand and single issue orders". twitter.com. 3 May 2018.
  2. ↑ Leftist magazine content to skip industry fads, By Karen K. Ho, CJR October 26, 2017
  3. ↑ Srinivasan, Meera (5 April 2016). "The voice of the American Left". The Hindu.
  4. ↑ "This is what you need to know". Bookforum. September 28, 2010.
  5. ↑ Blumgart, Jake (December 18, 2012). "The Next Left: An Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara". Boston Review.
  6. ↑ "No Short-Cuts: Interview with the Jacobin". Idiom magazine. March 16, 2011.
  7. 1 2 3 Sunkara, Bhaskar (2014). "Interview: Project Jacobin". New Left Review. 90: 28–43. Retrieved 26 March 2018.
  8. 1 2 "Jacobin Magazine: entretien avec Bhaskar Sunkara". revueperiode.net (French). October 19, 2015.
  9. ↑ Verso. "Jacobin Books series".
  10. ↑ Bhaskar Sunkara. "Class Action: An Activist Teacher's Handbook". Jacobin.
  11. ↑ Jacobin. "Jacobin Reading Groups Listing".
  12. ↑ "Announcing Catalyst". Jacobin Magazine. Jacobin Magazine. May 4, 2017. Retrieved June 10, 2017.
  13. ↑ Forbes, Remeike (Spring 2012). "The Black Jacobin. Our visual identity". Jacobin.
  14. ↑ "Jacobin Magazine: entretien avec Bhaskar Sunkara". revueperiode.net (French). October 19, 2015.
  15. 1 2 Blumgart, Jake (6 February 2016). "Jawnts: Giving socialism a good name". Philly.com. Philadelphia Media Network.
  16. ↑ Matthews, Dylan (21 March 2016). "Inside Jacobin: how a socialist magazine is winning the left's war of ideas". Vox.
  17. ↑ O'Donovan, Caroline (16 September 2014). "Jacobin: A Marxist rag run on a lot of petty-bourgeois hustle". Nieman Journalism Lab.
  18. ↑ Strasser, Max (9 November 2013). "Who are the new socialist wunderkinds of America?". New Statesman.
  19. ↑ Creegan, Jim (22 March 2018). "Walking the Tightrope". Weekly Worker. Retrieved 26 March 2018.
  20. ↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (January 1, 2013). "A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream". The New York Times.
  21. ↑ Michelle Goldberg. "A Generation of Intellectuals Shaped by 2008 Crash Rescues Marx From History's Dustbin". Tablet.
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